What's the Point?

This is a case study on ClassDojo done by an Dr. Ben Williamson, an education researcher at the University of Stirling in the UK. ClassDojo is a Silicon Valley-based edtech start-up where teachers can record, store, share, and reward students for positive behavior in classrooms. Dr. Williamson also uses ClassDojo to highlight pitfalls and promises in using EdTech products to implement social-emotional and competency-based learning in educational law.

ClassDojo

Bullet Notes:

• ClassDojo was started by 2 Brits in the Silicon Valley in 2011. Since, it has gained up to 35 million student users in 3 million teachers’ classrooms in 180 countries. It allows teachers and administrators to award “positive behavior” and participation in the classroom. It has since expanded to become a platform for recording and storing student’s behavioral data.
  • ClassDojo’s relatively concrete measurement system, as well as the volume of data has allowed it to become a “fast policy” agent in implementing social-emotional learning policy in the UK government.
• How ClassDojo gamification is used in practice:
  • Each student/teacher user can customize their avatar, a little dojo monster. This is the only way a user is visually represented on the platform.
  • Allows teachers to award “dojo points” for default categories: “hard work”, “participation”, “helping others”, “teamwork”, “leadership”, and “perseverance and grit”.
  • Teachers can also give warnings or deduct points (with an icon that says “needs work”)
  • Points can be awarded to individuals or groups of students.
  • It has apps for desktop, mobile, and tablet, allowing teachers to award students real-time (while walking around).
  • Teachers have access to a leaderboard. They’re encouraged to show it to students, but they don’t have to.
  • Many teachers have set up systems where students can exchange their points for rewards, good grades for points, etc.
• How ClassDojo’s teacher-parent interaction works:
  • Teachers have a feed-like interface where they can post updates, photos, and videos from the classroom. Parents can log on to see this feed, as well as their students’ points visually.
• It’s easy to identify the operant conditioning-esque technique applied by ClassDojo. It’s positive reinforcement to the extreme, which the New York Times criticized as “virtual badges for obedience” -- it’s biased toward rewarding compliance over individuality. The ability to show students’ progress alongside each other has also been criticized. Some have simply criticized the use of a product to implement policy as “corporate education reform”, which is pretty savage.
• Since 2016, ClassDojo has partnered with Stanford’s Growth Mindset Lab, PERTS (Project for Education Research that Scales). Founded by Dr. Carole Dweck, her theory of a “growth mindset” is founded on two theories on how people view their intelligence: those with an “entity theory of intelligence” believe their intelligence is fixed and cannot change, those with an “incremental theory of intelligence” perceives intelligence as subject to change through effort and hard work. The latter is more likely to respond positively to challenges. These are highlighted in Dweck’s books Mindset: the new psychology of success and Self-theories: their role in motivation, personality, and development.
  • For ClassDojo, this led to animations presented in class in which the dojo monster learns to develop an incremental growth mindset (phrased “adaptive growth mindset”), and that the brain is a muscle that can constantly grow, stretch, and adapt when tackling hard challenges.
  • For PERTS, ClassDojo provides volumes of data for their research.
  • Dweck also developed a spinoff company from her books, Mindset Works.
• ClassDojo’s increasing influence in government policy highlights governmental aspirations leaning toward behavioral change. This is a flawed mentality: it assumes that behavior is mostly predictable, habitual, and manipulable -- there are “sub-optimal citizens” whose behaviors we need to change.
• The positive side of these interventions are grounded in the core problem of students investing in their own education -- it’s rare and often groomed. So, persuasive technologies hold on to optimism that slight changes in language in the classroom can eventually lead to big changes in mindset as they go through school and beyond.